Pulls no punches here: LeBron James on X: “What are we even talking about here?? When I think about my kids and my family and how they will grow up, the choice is clear to me. VOTE KAMALA HARRIS!!!
Click through if you don’t see the devastating video…
George Clooney, via Vote Common Good, gives us the bro version of their recent ad featuring Julia Roberts reminding women that the secret ballot means that women don’t have to vote like their husbands tell them to.
Whether either ad will persuade large numbers of people is probably besides the point: it’s a game of small numbers at this point.
Incidentally, one of the terrible things about large-scale mail-in voting (as opposed to early in-person voting) is that it opens the door to voter intimidation and vote selling. It’s tough to sell your vote if there is no way for the buyer to know if you did what you promised. Both sales and pressure are easy at the kitchen table.
I voted via dropbox and it seems Miami-Dade elections accepted my ballot:
“Ballot 1” huh? Does that mean I can have more please?
Looks familiar somehow
Some guy named David B. Froomkin has a nice piece up at the Regulatory Review arguing that the Constitution’s Vesting Clause is not a broad grant of presidential power. It begins:
The Vesting thesis is back in the news.
Aditya Bamzai and Saikrishna Prakash recently published an article in which they returned to their exchange with Andrea Katz and Noah Rosenblum last year in the Harvard Law Review about the President’s power to remove executive officials from office. The debate centers on the Vesting Clause in Article II of the U.S. Constitution, which states that “the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The debate is primarily a historical one about which sources to rely on and how to interpret them in reconstructing Founding-era understandings of the meaning of “executive power.”
It is worth taking a step back from the historical discussion to appreciate the debate’s premises about how one ought to read the Constitution’s text.
Read the rest of Textual Tensions in the Vesting Thesis.
(I cancelled my subscription today.)
‘Washington Post’ won’t endorse in White House race for first time since 1980s — even though they editorialized that Trump is unfit to be President, and their news columns (frequently, if not frequently enough) make it obvious.
It’s not hard to imagine why owner Jeff Bezos did this: fear and greed. As Josh Marshall put it,
in the case of the Post, this is a bad and cowardly development. We can’t know for certain what went into these decisions. But the most obvious explanation is that they have billionaire owners who, especially in the case of Jeff Bezos, have other business interests which are vulnerable to adverse regulatory and contracting decisions as well as government harassment of other kinds. Those are very real threats and ones that a lawless president has a lot latitude to exact without much if any real prospect of redress. […]
The calculus is straightforward. If Harris wins the election, it doesn’t matter. Democratic administrations don’t play that way. Donald Trump’s do.
The big money is betting that there’s a real chance Trump gets elected. And in so doing helping make it so.
Kudos to Robert Kagan for immediately resigning, as an editorial contributor. Obviously these decisions will be harder for those employed by the Post full-time, and who find themselves in a dying industry where jobs are scarce. Even so…
Via TPM, a link to this 2018(!) video by Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley on whether Trump is a fascist:
Jotwell Blenderlaw